IT’S been 20 years since the publication of Carl T Rowan’s book, The Coming Race War in America: A Wake Up Call. It was in 1996 Rowan wrote that “we were immersed in a presidential campaign in which passions over race were at the forefront — and in unique and curious ways.
“[Republican presidential contender] Pat Buchanan proposed saying, ‘No way Jose,’ and building a wall to keep Mexicans out,” Rowan wrote.
Back then, Republican convention delegates were offended by such notions. It was just one of several reasons they chose Bob Dole, a senator from Kansas, over Buchanan. Twenty years later, however, we have seen Donald Trump become the Republican presidential nominee by making even more racially divisive statements than Buchanan’s.
To Rowan, a journalist and former US diplomat who died in 2000, signs of racial trouble could be found in the growth of white militia groups and in police departments that “reek with corruption, including condoned lawlessness by some policemen”.
His book was panned, however, for not making “the sound arguments his incendiary thesis demands”, as Jim Sleeper put it in a review of the book for The Washington Post. “He gives us islands of coherence in roiling seas of emotion,” Sleeper wrote. “He rigs together some of his own columns, old news items, and wild digressions.”
All of which was true.
But it was also the case that Rowan was not a man to make such a forecast lightly, as Sleeper understood. Rowan, an African-American, was a nationally syndicated columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. He had also been a diplomat during the Kennedy administration and a member of the National Security Council during the Johnson administration.
A resident of the District of Columbia, Rowan founded a scholarship program for DC-area students, called Project Excellence, and each year hosted a fundraising dinner that drew a racially and economically diverse crowd. It was as hopeful and optimistic an event as you’d find.
He was, as Sleeper noted, “an honest, if sometimes windy, voice for older, stolid, black working- and middle-class folk who owe much of their modest security to liberal initiatives, and to whom this country’s social fabric owes even more in return. If something has snapped in Rowan, one is tempted to pay heed.”
Few did.
Now here we are — with race relations in the United States widely regarded as being the worst in recent memory.
Earlier this month, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, noted an increase in chatter among such groups about starting a race war after a sniper killed five law enforcement officers and wounded seven others in Dallas on July 7.